Legislature didn't figure on real world in school budget cuts

Updated 4:13 pm, Sunday, October 23, 2011

Class, take out your calculators. Today, we will try to measure the impact of the Texas Legislature's decision to reduce education funding in the state by $537 per student a year.

For our equation, let's start with a school we'll call Bellaire High, and assume it has 125 more students than last year. Assume also that, given the budget cuts, the principal must cut nine positions. Determine how many more students - on the average - will be crammed into each class.

Extra-credit questions: How many more hours of grading papers will each teacher spend over the course of a semester? How many students won't be able to ask or answer a question during a typical class period because too many others raised their hands first?

How many fewer conversations with a teacher or counselor will the typical Bellaire High School student have over the course of a year?

Impossible to calculate, I know, but Bellaire Principal Tim Salem gave me the bottom line when I toured his school this week: Fewer teachers plus more students equals a diminished high school experience.

"It's the relationship piece I worry about," Salem said.

Elementary schools have dominated public concern over class sizes, since state law requires schools to keep the student-teacher ratio at or below 22-to-1.

Serious implications

This week, the Chronicle's Ericka Mellon wrote that the Legislature's decision to cut $4 billion from education formulas has forced a record number of districts to seek waivers from that requirement. Houston ISD will seek waivers for 1,048 classes, up from 693 last year. Aldine's requests jumped from 73 to 248; Cypress-Fairbanks' waivers increased from 9 to 294.

Since the class size limit doesn't extend to high schools or middle schools, no one is collecting data on the growth of those classes as administrators struggle to make do with less.

But the phenomenon is occurring - not just at Bellaire, but at high schools across the Houston area.

Lamar High Principal James McSwain estimates his classes are on average 8 to 10 students larger. Susan Kellner, Spring Branch ISD board president, says her district's middle school classes have jumped in size - with as many as 35 students in one class.

At Bellaire, Salem trimmed as few teachers as possible, but that meant he had to cut other staff positions, like a school counselor. Counselors manage class schedules and meet with kids in crisis; they are also the one adult constant in a student's high school career. "That's their graduation compass," Salem told me. Each Bellaire counselor now has a caseload of 450 to 500 students.

Salem said Bellaire has some classes with 40 and 41 students; math teacher Kathy Gardner told me she had a pre-AP geometry class that started the year with 43 students (though the class dwindled to 35 as students reacted to the workload.)

What's it like in a classroom with that many teenagers?

"I can't even walk between the desks," U.S. history teacher Lori Good told me. "I've tripped on backpacks twice."

She joked that maybe she's just uncoordinated, but there are serious implications: Her greatest challenge is grading papers, because that's the only way to help students sharpen their writing skills. "You can't provide the feedback and frequency to see improvement" when classes get too large, Good said. Last year, she averaged 30 to 32 students per class; this year it's 36 to 38.

Hard to know students

We're told repeatedly that class size isn't as important as a quality teacher, no doubt a valid point. But Mike Clark, a Bellaire social studies teacher who was named Houston ISD's high school teacher of the year, notes the difficulty in having one-on-one interaction as the teaching load swells.

"The bigger my classes get, the harder it is for me to have a personal relationship or even get to know them," Clark said. "Some kids I rarely have a conversation with."

Let's pause to acknowledge that most teenagers aren't terribly upset about not having a personal relationship with their teachers. That is, until they realize they need a college recommendation from one if they are going to get to move out of their parents' home.

And that, Good and Clark say, is when it helps to have had a memorable conversation or two with a teacher. Imagine having to write a college about a student who sat slumped on the back row for nine months.

Good spends most of her lunch periods meeting with students because "there's not enough time" to answer everyone's question in class. Gardner says the Bellaire advanced math teachers have volunteered to take more students so that those in on-level or remedial classes will be able to get individual attention.

Teachers, noted Kellner, "are good soldiers. They are professionals." But the Spring Branch board president said she is hearing complaints from parents who are "worried that their children are going to get less attention."

Those concerns should be directed at state lawmakers, many of whom argued that reducing per-student funding wouldn't really alter life in a Texas public school.

"I tell parents to tell their legislators what it looks like in reality and not just in theory," says Kellner. "This was a state decision."

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